Top 5 Tips for Dealing with the Family Responsibility Office

by familyllb on April 15, 2013

Top 5 Tips for Dealing with the Family Responsibility Office

A while ago I wrote about the role of the provincial Family Responsibility Office (FRO) More About The Family Responsibility Office, Some Common Problems Addressed. (For those who aren’t aware: In Ontario, all child support orders are automatically filed with the FRO, which operates under legislation giving it an arsenal of mechanisms by which to encourage and enforce timely payment of support on the part of the paying parent.)

If you are such a payor pursuant to a court-issued Support Order, here are five tips for dealing with the FRO:

1. Always keep the FRO updated on address changes.

Otherwise, you may miss out on receiving the various noticed that the FRO is required by law to give you. These may include a warning that the enforcement mechanisms that can be levied against you are about to be stepped up – for example a notice that your driver’s license is about to be suspended.

2. Keep the FRO apprised of your employment situation.

If you have lost your job, have been laid off work, or have had your income reduced due to disability or a reduction of overtime, then the FRO should be made aware. In such situations your next step may be to obtain a variation of the filed child support order that triggers the FRO’s involvement in the first place, which will in turn affect the FRO’s role and mandate in the enforcement process.

3. Don’t ignore anything you have received from the FRO.

Many of the processes involving the FRO allow for only a few days for you to respond; the FRO may quickly escalate the remedies available to assist with collection and you don’t want to be surprised by any of them. The FRO’s available avenues for encouraging your compliance and payment can include: suspending your driver’s license or passport, a garnishee of your wages (via a “Support Deduction Order” sent to your employer), filing writs or liens against your property, seizing your income tax refunds and HST rebates, seizing your bank accounts and – last but not least – imposing jail time of up to 180 days.

4. Document everything.

This includes not only your correspondence with the FRO, but also the paper trail of any support payments that you have made. Payments to the FRO can be made by way of internet banking or telephone banking and may be the easiest to document; payments by cheque or money order are more cumbersome to track. But regardless of the method, make sure to designate the FRO case number on any payment that you make.

5. Always make the mandated support payments if you can.

As mentioned, the FRO has a wide arsenal of options to deal with delays or non-payment, including jail time if necessary. Naturally, these shorter-term consequences should be avoided if at all possible. But there can be longer-term drawbacks as well: arrears in child support payments will show up negatively on your credit bureau report, which can affect you for years to come.

At Russell Alexander, Family Lawyers our focus is exclusively family law, offering pre-separation legal advice and assisting clients with family related issues including: custody and access, separation agreements, child and spousal support, division of family property, paternity disputes, and enforcement of court orders.

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FamilyLLB is written by Russell Alexander, a divorce and family law lawyer based in Ontario, Canada. For nearly twenty years, Russell's firm has helped clients who are going through a separation or divorce. You can find more of Russell's online commentary via Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, or on the firm's Facebook page.